Organization modelling of the collaborative process: a pattern-based approach

Systems for cooperative design are inherently complex and their development requires specific methods and modelling techniques with capacity to accurately specify their requirements. This paper presents the importance of social organization modelling of cooperative processes to describe more precisely the responsibilities to be assigned to each member and, therefore, guide the software analysis and design. Organizations have static and dynamic aspects that are relevant to identify in order to predict the group behaviour such as changes in member roles. This paper proposes a pattern-based approach to describe and identify these organizational structures. This method is incorporated in AMENITIES, a complete methodology for collaborative systems design developed in our research group.